Putin Superfans Made a 400-Page Book Full of His Sickest Burns

Any self-respecting authoritarian leader should be able to vanquish his enemies with sick burns. Sometimes that's literal, sometimes it's figurative. The people must fear you and your burns before they'll let you take over and make everything awesome. Donald J. Trump, the authoritarian apprentice, is learning this. Kim Jong-Un knows the power of insults in international film disputes. But the true master of the craft is Vladimir Putin, a fact confirmed by Reuters' report that his biggest fans have compiled a 400-page volume of his one-liners.

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The book, titled "The Words That Are Changing the World," is a crash course in how to break the spirit of your enemies with verbal barbs, be they Chechen rebels or other heads of state. Some of the insults make little or no sense when translated from Russian (or even in Russian, as far as we can tell), but all of them reveal the awesome power of Putin's words. Reuters highlighted a few:

"Putin's threat to 'rub out' Chechen militants in the 'out house'"

"A bizarre brush-off of Latvia in which he told Riga it could only expect to receive 'the ears of a dead donkey' from Moscow, a Russian expression for nothing"

The suggestion that "Turkey's political leadership may have 'decided to lick the Americans in a particular place' by shooting down a Russian warplane"

Putin's crack team of hype men know how to make the burn stick, too. After the book's pro-Putin publisher, Network, left 1000 copies with the Kremlin, members of his administration were nice enough to dish them out to government officials. They just had one small request:

[Officials said] they had received the present and had been told by a top Putin aide that it should sit on their desks. The tome would help them understand the decisions underpinning Russia's domestic and foreign policy, the aide was quoted as saying.

Putin doesn't mess around. As a truly diabolical hater, he might just find himself as Europe's representative at next year's Player Haters Ball.

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